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Emmanuelle Antille
Strings of Affection
Video | dv | color | 9:41 | Switzerland | 2009
"Strings of Affection" shows the particular connection of a woman with her domestic space Using a ball of string, she begins weaving threads through all the rooms of the house, creating a web inside the apartment. Little by little a strange inner geometry takes shape, a geometry which is at once very liberating, but starts to be paradoxically totally constricting. The apartment becomes a mental space, a mirror place of the psyche of the character, " as if we could follow the thread of her thoughts ". The architecture appears as a place of mutation, at the same time very opened on the outside, while closing on itself as a trap. Taken in this net, the woman?s body is forced, whereas its spirit escapes and the gestures are liberated.
Emmanuelle Antille was born in 1972 in Lausanne, Switzerland. She studied at the Ecole Supérieure d`Art Visuel in Geneva, and at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam. She makes films, photographs and installations, writes texts and scripts, is a singer and musician. These heterogeneous aspects of her artistic production give life to autonomous works or to interventions in which the fusion of these various elements animate installations where dream, illusion and reality merge and overlap. Her interest is concentrated on the analysis of domestic relations and behaviours, the dynamics established within groups, and behavioural that characterise the life of a clan. With actors in her films, she creates scenes in which human relations analysed within a ritual, such as a game, become exasperated into tortured confessions or mysterious silences. Her stories are a subtle and poetic reflection on questions relating to the double, to introspection, and to communication with others: ?All my work rotates around a certain distance from reality, the relationship with sound, the boundary between dream and reality, hallucination?. The language of video becomes a way to rewrite emotions, to capture life in its most intimate aspects, to translate dream images into reality. Antille has received several recognitions and awards including: three Swiss Art Awards, Kiefer-Hablitzel Prize, Review + film contest, Migros Culture, Swiss Studio in Berlin and in Couvent des Recollets in Paris. Her exhibitions include: Kunstverein in Frankfurt, The Renaissance Society in Chicago, CCA in Glasgow, Site Gallery in Sheffield, Toyko Wonder Site in Tokyo, De Appel in Amsterdam, Migros Museum in Zürich, Musée du Jeu de Paume in Paris. In 2003 she represented Switzerland in the 50th edition of the Venice Biennale.